This message is a call to action for those people interested in automated
configuration of debugging environments. The SPIRIT Consortium is looking
to apply the IP-XACT standard in the area of machine-interpretable
descriptions of debug targets. This effort is kicking off in September, and
early results from this work will be emerging in early H1 2007. Those
people interested in helping improve flow-integration for the debug
ecosystem, including modeling, design tool and hard prototyping
environments, may want to consider participating in this new activity.

Motivation:
========
As embedded systems become more complex, and timescales for system
development have become shorter, the effort required to describe such
systems to software debug tools has constantly increased. A large part of
this problem is that each debug tool requires its own description of the
target system, and, in most cases, these descriptions have to be written
manually. With regular design iteration between multiple representations
of a design in ESL, implementation and hard-prototype formats, hand
authoring of target descriptions is becoming impractical. It is necessary
to develop a standard for the description of debug targets that can be
generated, maintained and interpreted by the multiple environments that
represent a design today.

Proposal:
=======
We believe that the IP-XACT standard from The Spirit Consortium
(www.spiritconsortium.org) has the basic elements to form such a
multi-vendor standard . This has a number of advantages:
a.. IP-XACT is an existing standard that is already able to describe much
of the information needed by debug tools. As such the developers of the
standard for debug target descriptions can leverage this existing work,
hence drastically reducing the time and effort needed to develop such a
standard. In some cases, prototypes of its usage are already in evidence.
b.. Many hardware design tools (EDA and ESL tools) are able to generate
IP-XACT descriptions of hardware, and use these descriptions to exchange
information about the hardware during the hardware design process. Debug
tools can make use of descriptions generated as part of the hardware design
process, hence drastically reducing the work required to generate debug
target descriptions.
c.. Formal semantics to check the validity of IP-XACT descriptions are
part of The SPIRIT Consortium standards. This means that infrastructure for
checking these generated descriptions is in place for the current standards,
and will be extended to support IP-XACT for debug.
Based on market requests, The Spirit Consortium has decided to create a
new technical working group to standardize the use of IP-XACT to describe
debug targets, and have appointed me interim chairman of the group. The
attached draft charter describes the role of this working group. I would
like to invite you help launch this group by participating in its first
meeting.

The first meeting is open to all interested parties, whether or not they are
members of The SPIRIT Consortium. You may participate in the meeting either
by web and phone conferencing, or in person at ARM Cambridge . The meeting
will run from 4pm to 6pm UK time on Wednesday the 13th of September.

The main agenda items at this meeting will be:
1 - An introduction to The SPIRIT Consortium and IP-XACT.
2 - An introduction to the use of IP-XACT for debug target description
3 - A review of the proposed charter of the working group.
4 - Discussion of compelling milestones for delivery (foundation for a
schedule)
5 - A review of the group's working arrangements, and in particular its
arrangements for interworking with other industry groups working in this
area; including Eclipse Debug DSDP (Device Software Development Platform)
Project, and SPRINT WP4.

For remote participation you will need to participate in both the conference
call and the web conference. The conference call details are:
UK Number : 0870 411 6949
- this is the main dial in number for UK based participants. When you dial
in, the call will be answered with 'Welcome to MeetingZone' and you will be
prompted to enter your access code followed by #. You will then be asked to
give your name, then press #. If you are not the chair person, you will hear
music until the chair person joins the call and enters the HostAccessCode
number.